Following up on my post from yesterday, saw this article from next-gen.biz on a Ubisoft investor meeting. In the article, the CFO states that:
"CFO Alain Martinez added that DS games, with their relatively low development costs, achieve profitability at around 100,000 units sold, while a next-gen game for PS3 or Xbox 360 needs to sell around 1.3 million."
This should encourage many 3rd party publishers to bring their top franchises to the DS. However, I'm still worried about what the overall quality of these games will be and if any of the control schemes attempted will be physically hurtful like Metroid Prime Hunters.
My advice, make sure you do what Advance Wars: Dual Strike does. This superb title offers touch screen based controls but also offers a "classic" control scheme that is identical to the Game Boy games of the franchise. This is fortunate since the touch screen control scheme of that game is unusable. Offering a classic control scheme salvaged this gem instead of dooming it.
That being said, offering two control scheme is not always that easy to implement. Zelda: Phantom Hourglass is nothing short of fantastic. One of the reason is the new control scheme based completely on "touch". If given a choice, I suspect many users would have opted for a more classic control scheme and would have missed out on the shear genius that are the touch controls in this game.
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